First mentioned in July 2015 by Mark Anderson in American Free Press, the 1997 paper entitled "OSS, CIA and European unity: The American committee on United Europe, 1948-60" authored by Prof. Richard J. Aldrich then at the University of Nottingham and published in the journal Diplomacy and Statecraft is a must-read for participants and readers of this forum. The most relevant excerpt:

Viewed from Europe, the most striking aspect of the American Committee on United Europes (ACUE's) work is the extent to which officials working for European reconstruction and unification shared the experience of wartime intelligence, special operations and resistance. European unity had taken root in wartime resistance movements. These links with clandestine organizations continue into the postwar period. The emerging European Community and the growing Western intelligence community overlapped to a considerable degree. This is firmly underlined by the creation of Retinger's Bilderberg Group, an informal secretive transatlantic council of key decision makers developed between 1952 and 1954. The Bilderberg Group grew out of the same overlapping networks of drawn from the European Community and the Western intelligence community. Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952 in response to the rise of anti-Americanism in western Europe and was designed to define some sort of Atlantic consensus amid diverging European and American outlooks. It brought leading European and American personalities together once a year for an informal discussion of their differences. Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller and Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower's psychological warfare coordinator, CD. Jackson, and the funding for the first meeting, held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland in 1954, was provided by the CIA. Thereafter, much of its funding came from the Ford Foundation. By 1958, those attending Bilderberg included McCloy, Dean Acheson, George Ball and Paul Nitze. It is striking that three important transnational elite groups emerging in the 1950s: the European Movement, the Bilderberg Group and Jean Monnet's Action Committee for a United States of Europe all shared the broadly the same origins and sources of support.

Although Bilderberg and ACUE European Movement shared broadly the same founders, members and objectives, arguably Bilderberg constituted the more effective mechanism of transatlantic dialogue, developing into what some have regarded as the most significant discreet forum for Western elites. Unlike ACUE-European Movement, it was not constrained by subject, nor was it divided into separate European and American bodies, linked by the activities of scurrying envoys. The subjects over which the annual meetings ranged were too wide, even in the formal sessions, to permit detailed analysis here, but it is clear that the Rome Treaty was nurtured by discussions at Bilderberg in the preceding year. In the mid-1950s the European delegates were most concerned to use Bilderberg underline the damage being done to the standing of the United States by McCarthyism in general and the Rosenberg trial in particular. In 1954, CD. Jackson went out of his way to assure the European delegates that McCarthy would be gone by the time of the next meeting  and he was. In the 1960s the focus shifted to the Third World and development issues. The value of Bilderberg is impossible to assess, but there has been consistent top-level attendance, including every British Prime Minister over three decades. This, together with its eventual development in the 1970s into the Trilateral Commission with the incorporation of Japan, suggests that the participants have considered it worthwhile.